Cartilage is a smooth tissue which covers bones so that they can slide against each other in joints such as the knee, shoulder or hip. It's a pretty amazing tissue - cartilage slides better than ice-on-ice. However, cartilage has a weakness: There are no blood vessels in cartilage, and thus it has a hard time recovering from injury. Many people are currently working on trying to find methods of treating cartilage injury. In order to see how they're doing, they need good ways to look at cartilage. That's where MRI of cartilage comes in!
Here is an MRI of the knee. This is an axial image, which means it's as if we've cut perpendicular to the direction of a straight leg. The image shows the patella (knee cap) and the femur, which is the thigh bone. Of course, we're interested in looking at the cartilage. Thus we use special techniques to make the bone come out dark on the images. The cartilage is bright, and the synovial fluid is even brighter, as you see in the picture.
One way to speed up the MRI knee exam is to make the individual scans faster. Another is to reduce the number of scans. We're trying to do the second. If we have one type of image which gives us the same amount of information as two others, we've just knocked about 5 minutes off the total scanning time.
These are some different images of the same knee. The main thing that you should look for is the different contrast between cartilage, synovial fluid, and bone. Our technique tries to show the cartilage as well as the standard techniques, but also shows very bright synovial fluid. This can be helpful, because if the cartilage has a crack or tear, the fluid tends to flow into the tear.
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